The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature

Download The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 039360831X
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature written by Adam Kirsch and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible introduction to the classics of Jewish literature, from the Bible to modern times, by "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal). Jews have long embraced their identity as “the people of the book.” But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts, including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Glückel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestoes of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of Roman Egypt to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence.

The People and the Books

Download The People and the Books PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0393241769
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The People and the Books by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book The People and the Books written by Adam Kirsch and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential exploration of a rich literary tradition from the Bible to modern times, by a “rare literary authority” (New York Times Book Review) and “one of our keenest critics” (Washington Post). Jews have long embraced their identity as “the people of the book.” But outside of the Bible, much of the Jewish literary tradition remains little known to nonspecialist readers. The People and the Books shows how central questions and themes of our history and culture are reflected in the Jewish literary canon: the nature of God, the right way to understand the Bible, the relationship of the Jews to their Promised Land, and the challenges of living as a minority in Diaspora. Adam Kirsch explores eighteen classic texts, including the biblical books of Deuteronomy and Esther, the philosophy of Maimonides, the autobiography of the medieval businesswoman Glückel of Hameln, and the Zionist manifestoes of Theodor Herzl. From the Jews of Roman Egypt to the mystical devotees of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, The People and the Books brings the treasures of Jewish literature to life and offers new ways to think about their enduring power and influence.

Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?

Download Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300245130
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer? written by Adam Kirsch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of today’s keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the two Adam Kirsch is one of today’s finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the intersections between them, with a particular focus on Jewish literature. He explores the definition of Jewish literature, the relationship between poetry and politics, and the future of literary reputation in the age of the internet. Several essays look at the way Jewish writers such as Stefan Zweig and Isaac Deutscher, who coined the phrase “the non-Jewish Jew,” have dealt with politics. Kirsch also examines questions of spirituality and morality in the writings of contemporary poets, including Christian Wiman, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney. He closes by asking why so many American Jewish writers have resisted that category, inviting us to consider “Is there such a thing as Jewish literature?”

The Blessing and the Curse

Download The Blessing and the Curse PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0393652408
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Blessing and the Curse by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book The Blessing and the Curse written by Adam Kirsch and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An erudite and accessible survey of Jewish life and culture in the twentieth century, as reflected in seminal texts. Following The People and the Books, which "covers more than 2,500 years of highly variegated Jewish cultural expression" (Robert Alter, New York Times Book Review), poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch now turns to the story of modern Jewish literature. From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience. Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions of major books by over thirty writers—ranging from Franz Kafka to Philip Roth, Elie Wiesel to Tony Kushner, Hannah Arendt to Judith Plaskow—he argues that literature offers a new way to think about what it means to be Jewish in the modern world. With a wide scope and diverse, original observations, Kirsch draws fascinating parallels between familiar writers and their less familiar counterparts. While everyone knows the diary of Anne Frank, for example, few outside of Israel have read the diary of Hannah Senesh. Kirsch sheds new light on the literature of the Holocaust through the work of Primo Levi, explores the emergence of America as a Jewish home through the stories of Bernard Malamud, and shows how Yehuda Amichai captured the paradoxes of Israeli identity. An insightful and engaging work from "one of America’s finest literary critics" (Wall Street Journal), The Blessing and the Curse brings the Jewish experience vividly to life.

The Puttermesser Papers

Download The Puttermesser Papers PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0679777393
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (797 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Puttermesser Papers by : Cynthia Ozick

Download or read book The Puttermesser Papers written by Cynthia Ozick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-06-30 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality." Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city - and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that a paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists. "The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." -San Francisco Chronicle "Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." -The New York Times "A crazy delight." -The New York Time Book Review

Jewish American Literature

Download Jewish American Literature PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393048094
Total Pages : 1264 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (48 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Jewish American Literature by : Jules Chametzky

Download or read book Jewish American Literature written by Jules Chametzky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.

The Lion Seeker

Download The Lion Seeker PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Knopf Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307362159
Total Pages : 538 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Lion Seeker by : Kenneth Bonert

Download or read book The Lion Seeker written by Kenneth Bonert and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brawny, brilliant debut novel about the epic struggles of an immigrant son in a darkening world. Johannesburg, South Africa. The Great Depression. In this harsh new country, young Isaac Helger burns with fiery determination— to break out of the inner city, to buy his scarred mother the home she longs for, to find a way to realize her dream of reuniting a family torn apart. But there are terrible, unspoken secrets of the past that will haunt him as he makes his way through a society brutalized by racism, as he loses his heart to an unattainable girl from the city’s wealthiest heights and his every exit route from poverty dead-ends. When the threat of the Second World War insinuates itself with brutal force into Isaac’s reality, he will face the most important choice of his life . . . and will have to learn to live with the consequences. In this extraordinarily powerful novel, Kenneth Bonert brings alive the world of South African Jewry in all its raw energy and ribald vernacular. Comedic, searing, lyrical and with a snap-perfect ear for dialogue, The Lion Seeker is a profoundly moral exploration of how wider social forces shape us and shatter us, echoing through history with lessons that are no less relevant today than in the crucible of its time.

Why Trilling Matters

Download Why Trilling Matters PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 030017828X
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Why Trilling Matters by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book Why Trilling Matters written by Adam Kirsch and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lionel Trilling, regarded at the time of his death in 1975 as America's preeminent literary critic, is today often seen as a relic of a vanished era. His was an age when literary criticism and ideas seemed to matter profoundly in the intellectual life of the country. In this eloquent book, Adam Kirsch shows that Trilling, far from being obsolete, is essential to understanding our current crisis of literary confidence--and to overcoming it.By reading Trilling primarily as a writer and thinker, Kirsch demonstrates how Trilling's original and moving work continues to provide an inspiring example of a mind creating itself through its encounters with texts. "Why Trilling Matters" introduces all of Trilling's major writings and situates him in the intellectual landscape of his century, from Communism in the 1930s to neoconservatism in the 1970s. But Kirsch goes deeper, addressing today's concerns about the decline of literature, reading, and even the book itself, and finds that Trilling has more to teach us now than ever before. As Kirsch writes, "Trilling's essays are not exactly literary criticism" but, like all literature, "ends in themselves."

The Death's Head Chess Club

Download The Death's Head Chess Club PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374713979
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (747 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Death's Head Chess Club by : John Donoghue

Download or read book The Death's Head Chess Club written by John Donoghue and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel of the improbable friendship that arises between a Nazi officer and a Jewish chessplayer in Auschwitz SS Obersturmfuhrer Paul Meissner arrives in Auschwitz from the Russian front wounded and fit only for administrative duty. His most pressing task is to improve camp morale and he establishes a chess club, and allows officers and enlisted men to gamble on the games. Soon Meissner learns that chess is also played among the prisoners, and there are rumors of an unbeatable Jew known as "the Watchmaker." Meissner's superiors begin to demand that he demonstrate German superiority by pitting this undefeated Jew against the best Nazi players. Meissner finds Emil Clément, the Watchmaker, and a curious relationship arises between them. As more and more games are played, the stakes rise, and the two men find their fates deeply entwined. Twenty years later, the two meet again in Amsterdam—Meissner has become a bishop, and Emil is playing in an international chess tournament. Having lost his family in the horrors of the death camps, Emil wants nothing to do with the ex-Nazi officer despite their history, but Meissner is persistent. "What I hope," he tells Emil, "is that I can help you to understand that the power of forgiveness will bring healing." As both men search for a modicum of peace, they recall a gripping tale of survival and trust. A suspenseful meditation on understanding and guilt, John Donoghue's The Death's Head Chess Club is a bold debut and a rich portrait of a surprising friendship.

Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period

Download Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
ISBN 13 : 9780830826780
Total Pages : 532 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (267 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period by : Larry R. Helyer

Download or read book Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period written by Larry R. Helyer and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2002-07-05 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Larry R. Helyer provides an introduction and historical context for the wealth of Jewish literature outside the Hebrew Bible, and he explores the pressures, realities, questions and dreams that nurtured and provoked these written works.

Suddenly, Love

Download Suddenly, Love PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805243151
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (52 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Suddenly, Love by : Aharon Appelfeld

Download or read book Suddenly, Love written by Aharon Appelfeld and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2014-05-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Aharon Appelfeld is one of the subtlest, most unorthodox, and most exactingly perceptive novelists to make the memory of the Holocaust his abiding project." --Philip Gourevitch, The New Yorker A lonely older man and his devoted young caretaker transform each other’s lives in ways they could never have imagined. Ernst is a gruff seventy-year-old Red Army veteran from Ukraine who landed, almost by accident, in Israel after World War II. A retired investment adviser, he lives alone (his first wife and baby daughter were killed by the Nazis; he divorced his shrewish second wife) and spends his time laboring over his unpublished novels. Irena, in her mid-thirties, is the unmarried daughter of Holocaust survivors who has been taking care of Ernst since his surgery two years earlier; she arrives every morning promptly at eight and usually leaves every afternoon at three. Quiet and shy, Irena is in awe of Ernst’s intellect. And as the months pass, Ernst comes to depend on the gentle young woman who runs his house, listens to him read from his work, and occasionally offers a spirited commentary on it. But Ernst’s writing gives him no satisfaction, and he is haunted by his godless, Communist past. His health, already poor, begins to deteriorate even further; he becomes mired in depression and seems to lose the will to live. But this is something Irena will not allow. As she becomes an increasingly important part of his life—moving into his home, encouraging him in his work, easing his pain—Ernst not only regains his sense of self and discovers the path through which his writing can flow but he also discovers, to his amazement, that Irena is in love with him. And, even more astonishing, he realizes that he is in love with her, too.

Come and Hear

Download Come and Hear PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781684580682
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (86 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Come and Hear by : Adam Kirsch

Download or read book Come and Hear written by Adam Kirsch and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mainly intended for readers who have little sense of what the Talmud actually is, Kirsch explores the Talmud as a critic and journalist. Maybe the best way to describe this book is as a kind of travelogue-a report on what Kirsch saw during his seven-and-a-half-year journey through the Talmud"--

The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination

Download The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780815628583
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (285 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination by : Dan Miron

Download or read book The Image of the Shtetl and Other Studies of Modern Jewish Literary Imagination written by Dan Miron and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2000-12-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While A Traveler Disguised focused on the rhetoric of the speaking voice or the persona in these classics, the nine essays gathered here concentrate on the artistic reconstruction of the "world" conveyed by that persona. As much as the earlier volume put to rest the conventional understanding of "Mendele the Book-Peddler" as a mere representative of the author, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, this book invalidates the common views of the literary shtetl as a mere mimetic reflection of the historical Jewish shtetl of Eastern Europe and examines its structure as an autonomous aesthetic construct. These essays dwell particularly on the fictional modalities displayed in some of Sholem Aleichem's major works. They also offer innovative insights into the works of both earlier and later masters such as A. M. Dik, Y. Aksenfeld, Y .Y. Linetski and Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Y. L. Peretz, I. M. Vaysenberg, Sh. Asch, D. Bergelson, and I. B. Singer.

A Book that was Lost and Other Stories

Download A Book that was Lost and Other Stories PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 9780805210668
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (16 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Book that was Lost and Other Stories by : Shmuel Yosef Agnon

Download or read book A Book that was Lost and Other Stories written by Shmuel Yosef Agnon and published by Schocken. This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This broad selection of the short stories of SY Agnon winner of the 1966 Nobel prize for literature presents a panoramic and probing vision of the writer as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emergent society of modern Israel.

Israel and Humanity

Download Israel and Humanity PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Paulist Press
ISBN 13 : 9780809135417
Total Pages : 478 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (354 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Israel and Humanity by : Elia Benamozegh

Download or read book Israel and Humanity written by Elia Benamozegh and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book forms a grand synthesis of Benamozegh's religious thought. It is at once a wide-ranging summa of scriptural, Talmudic, Midrashic, and kabbalistic ideas, and an intensely personal account of Jewish identity.

My Name Is Asher Lev

Download My Name Is Asher Lev PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307422348
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis My Name Is Asher Lev by : Chaim Potok

Download or read book My Name Is Asher Lev written by Chaim Potok and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. “A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. He grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. He is torn between two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other devoted only to art and his imagination, and in time, his artistic gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous, visionary portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant.

Lot Six

Download Lot Six PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062097016
Total Pages : 427 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (62 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Lot Six by : David Adjmi

Download or read book Lot Six written by David Adjmi and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the great American memoirs, a heartbreaking, hilarious story of what it means to make things up, including yourself. A wild tale of lack and lies, galling humiliations and majestic reinventions, this touching, coruscating joy of a book is an answer to that perennial question: how should a person be?” — Olivia Laing, author of Crudo and The Lonely City In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, award-winning playwright David Adjmi (the playwright behind the most Tony-nominated show of all time and winner of best new play, Stereophonic) explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art. Brooklyn, 1970s. Born into the ruins of a Syrian Jewish family that once had it all, David is painfully displaced. Trapped in an insular religious community that excludes him and a family coming apart at the seams, he is plunged into suicidal depression. Through adolescence, David tries to suppress his homosexual feelings and fit in, but when pushed to the breaking point, he makes the bold decision to cut off his family, erase his past, and leave everything he knows behind. There's only one problem: who should he be? Bouncing between identities he steals from the pages of fashion magazines, tomes of philosophy, sitcoms and foreign films, and practically everyone he meets—from Rastafarians to French preppies—David begins to piece together an entirely new adult self. But is this the foundation for a life, or just a kind of quicksand? Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan’s 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi’s memoir is a genre bending Künstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity. Raw and lyrical, and written in gleaming prose that veers effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, Lot Six charts Adjmi’s search for belonging, identity, and what it takes to be an artist in America.